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ACUPUNCTURE FOR MIGRAINES

Acupuncture Superior to Drug Therapy for Migraines

Study Highlights the "Exceptional Usefulness" of Treatment

In one of the largest studies of its kind to date, a team of investigators in Italy examined the effectiveness of acupuncture versus a variety of pharmacological therapies in treating migraines. Their results, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine,² revealed that patients given acupuncture:

• experienced fewer migraine episodes
• missed fewer days from work
• suffered no side effects compared to patients on conventional drug therapy.
• they also found acupuncture to be more cost-efficient, estimating a savings of hundreds of millions of dollars in private and social health expenditures if it were used to treat headaches alone instead of drugs.

References NHF Headache Facts. Available from the National Headache Foundation (www.headaches.org). Liguori A, Petti F, Bangrazi A, Camaioni D, Guccione G, Pitari GM, Bianchi A, Nicoletti WE. Comparison of pharmacological treatment versus acupuncture treatment for migraine without aura - analysis of sociomedical parameters. J Tradit Chin Med 2000;20(3):231-40.

NEWS IN SCIENCE:

Acupuncture gives migraine therapy a lift

Patricia Reaney

Reuters                                    Tuesday, 16 March 2004 

Acupuncture is a useful, cost-effective treatment for chronic headaches or migraines, U.S. and U.K. researchers have found.

In one of the largest randomised studies to assess the effectiveness of this ancient Chinese treatment, scientists found adding acupuncture to standard treatment worked better than using standard treatment alone.

The scientists published their study online ahead of print in the British Medical Journal.

"People using acupuncture had fewer headaches, less severe headaches and they used less health resources over the course of the following year," said one of the authors Dr Andrew Vickers, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The scientists compared acupuncture plus standard treatment to standard treatment alone in 401 patients in England and Wales who suffered from headaches several days each week. Most patients in the trial had migraines.

Patients who were assigned acupuncture plus standard treatment had up to 12 acupuncture treatments over three months from an experienced practitioner.

Patients receiving acupuncture:

·        had 22 fewer days of headaches a year,

·        used 15% less medication,

·        made 25% fewer visits to their family doctors

·        took 15% fewer days off sick than the other group.

Vickers and his colleagues also found the treatment cost-effective.

"For severely affected patients, acupuncture reduced the severity and the frequency of their headaches to make a real difference in their lives," Vickers said.

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German Migraine Sufferers Refuse Drugs, Ask for Acupuncture Instead

May 29th, 2008 Posted in Acupuncture, Health Reports

The authors of a large German research study comparing the effectiveness of Acupuncture to the drug metoprolol in treating migraine headaches found that German patients suffering from the dreadful pain and misery of migraine “expressed a strong preference for treatment with Acupuncture” rather than risk the potentially life-threat­ening side-effects of the drug.

“Also, patients receiving metoprolol rather than Acupuncture were con­siderably more likely to discontinue treatment,” the authors stated.

The headache study was part of a larger nationwide research project to study the effectiveness of Acupuncture for headaches, chronic low back pain, and pain from osteoarthritis. The results showed that, for all three conditions, Acupuncture produced a clear ben­efit that lasted for at least several months, and whose benefit was greatest in the osteoarthritis groups. In all three categories, Acupuncture proved extremely effective at reducing pain and inflammation compared to either traditional drug or other treatments, or no treatment at all.

The study was aimed at providing more information for the government to ascertain whether Acupuncture for these conditions should be covered by medical insurance.

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Dr. Enrico Facco, of the University of Padua, and his colleagues looked at how traditionally performed acupuncture stood up against two sham forms for preventing migraines.

They randomly assigned 160 migraine sufferers to one of four groups:

In one, patients received twice-weekly sessions of acupuncture using traditional acupuncture points; a second group received sham acupuncture as it is usually performed in studies; a third group also underwent sham acupuncture, but with the blunted needles touching traditional acupuncture points; the fourth served as a control group, in which patients received no acupuncture or preventive medication.

Over six months, Facco's team found, only the group receiving true, traditional acupuncture showed lasting improvement in migraine disability measured on a standardized scale, compared with the control group.

The "main novelty" of the study, Facco told Reuters Health, is that the therapy was based on traditional Chinese medicine, but studied using the modern, "Western" scientific method.

It's not completely clear why acupuncture might ease migraine pain. In addition to the traditional theories on qi, modern research has suggested that acupuncture may work by altering signals among nerve cells or affecting the release of various chemicals of the central nervous system.                                    SOURCE: Headache, March 2008.

Acupuncture helps chronic headaches

Reuters.  Published: Thursday, August 28, 2008

A study by German researchers is one of the largest to date on using acupuncture to ease headaches.

"Acupuncture plus routine care in patients with headache was associated with marked clinical improvements compared with routine care alone," said Dr. Stefan N. Willich of Charite University Medical Center in Berlin, who headed the research team.

The scientists, who published their findings in the journal Cephalalgia, followed more than 15,000 adults with chronic headaches. All of the patients had been suffering from either migraine or tension-type headaches at least twice a month for a year or more.

Nearly 3,200 patients agreed to be randomly assigned to either have acupuncture added to their regular therapy or to stick with their usual care. The rest of the patients began on acupuncture treatment.

All of the acupuncture patients received up to 15 sessions over three months, and all were reassessed after six months.

The researchers said acupuncture patients reported greater pain improvements than those who stayed with their usual care only. At the start of the study, they reported an average of 8.4 headache days over three months, which almost halved to 4.7 by the time the study ended.

In the usual care only group, the average number of headache days was 8.1 days initially, and 7.5 days at the end of the study.

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Headaches and Migraines in Children

 The July 2008 issue of Pain, a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal published by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), featured a German study conducted by eight pediatric doctors and clinicians. The researchers attempted to determine whether or not laser acupuncture would prove effective in relieving the symptoms of chronic headaches in 43 children.

The treatment for each child was individualized and completely based on the traditional Chinese medical theory. The theory contends that bioelectricity, or the electrical current that is produced by living organisms, has a tendency to follow paths of higher conductivity within the human body. These paths, called meridians, have been shown to be composed of points that have a higher electrical conductivity (lower electrical impedance) than other parts of the body. The ancient Chinese somehow discovered that stimulating these points, or "acupoints," produced changes in the body’s flow of current, and by doing so, influenced the health of an individual. Stimulation of these points include many different methods, the most well-known being acupuncture. Acupuncture is when very thin, electrical-conducting needles are inserted into these “acupoints” with the intention of manipulating the current.

Laser acupuncture, a relatively new method of stimulation, uses low-energy lasers to influence the flow of current at the acupoints. The German study, which is titled “Laser acupuncture in children with headache: A double-blind, randomized, bicenter, placebo-controlled trial,” specifically focuses on the effect of laser stimulation compared to placebo-stimulation.

The German Study

The study was carried out using the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled method so that the accuracy of the results would be as conclusive as the modern scientific method could allow. The German doctors wanted to know once and for all if active laser treatment is superior to placebo laser treatment; in other words, does it really work?

The conductors of the study took 43 children suffering from either chronic migraine headaches (22 patients) or chronic tension headaches (21 patients) and gave them four randomized treatments over four weeks. Each random treatment was double-blind, which means they were conducted so that both the researcher and the participant were unaware whether the laser had been set at the appropriate strength, or not set at all. Double-blind trials are believed to produce objective results, since the expectations of the researcher and the participant are believed to not affect the outcome.

The results of the study were analyzed in three ways. The first method examined and compared the number of “headache days,” or days that the children suffered from headaches. The researchers took the average number of headache days before the treatments and compared them with the average number of headache days after the treatment in both the placebo and the true treatment patients.

The second method compared the severity of the pain using a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). The VAS is a medical tool that helps a person rate the intensity of certain sensations and feelings, such as pain. The VAS is obviously highly subjective; however, researchers commonly use this tool in order to examine changes in individuals over periods of time. In the scientific community, using the VAS to catalogue changes in perception over extended periods of time is seen as more reliable than using it at a single point of time.

The final method for analyzing the results was to compare the amount of time each child experienced headaches before and after the treatments. The changes in the amount of "headache time" were then examined for the true treatment cases and the placebo treatments.

The Results

The results were as follows: the mean number of “headache days” decreased by 1.0 day in the placebo group and 6.4 days in the treated group.

The VAS, in contrast to the placebo group, showed a significant decrease in the children’s perception of the severity of the headaches. Finally, the children’s total amount of time with headaches was found to be much lower than the placebo group.

In other words, the children who received true l acupuncture had less days where headaches occurred, felt less pain when headaches did occur and experienced much less time with headaches than the children who thought they were getting treatment but in fact were not.

The German researchers concluded, “that laser acupuncture can provide a significant benefit for children with headache, with active laser treatment being clearly more effective than placebo laser treatment.”

The IASP

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), founded in 1973, is the leading professional forum for science, practice, and education in the field of pain. Membership in IASP is open to professionals involved in research, diagnosis or treatment of pain. IASP has more than 7,000 members in 114 countries. Pain, the official journal of IASP, publishes original research on the nature, mechanisms, and treatment of pain. IASP Press produces timely, high-quality books for scientists and clinicians interested in pain research and management.

Sources

1) http://www.painjournalonline.com/articl...)00571-4/abstract

2) http://www.jurology.com/article/S0304-3...)00571-4/abstract

3) http://www.iasp-pain.org//AM/Template.c...

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More data to be posted here soon.

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